[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Control Panel Font configuration

[Tim McNamara]

2010/1/31 Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com>

> Sayamindu Dasgupta writes:
>
> > It may make sense to allow setting of the font as well. While the
> > default "Sans" may be good enough for most European scripts, it may
> > cause problems for Arabic, Asian, South Asian scripts, etc. "Sans"
> > usually resolves to DejaVu Sans, etc, which often carry suboptimal
> > glyphs from non Latin scripts
>
> I think it's only fair that you get suboptimal glyphs too. :-)
>
> DejaVu Sans looks bad even for English with plain ASCII. Among other
> things, somebody invented a screwy non-standard way to distinguish the
> lowercase L ("l") character. That sort of "innovation" just isn't what
> you do in a system-wide default font. The rest is messed up too.
>
> BTW, consider a document containing several languages. You'd normally
> want all the Latin-based ones to use one font, all the Cyrillic ones to
> use one font, and so on. In other words, per-script (not per-language)
> selection of the font. If I remember right, there are about 14 scripts
> in active use around the world.
>
>
I thought that Gentium may have a sans serif typeface. No, but they refer to
Andika SIL : "Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed
especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning
readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not
be readily confused with one another."

Seems to fit the bill very well. It is released under an open font licence,
however I remember hearing difficulties with typeface licencing & GPL.
Here's a link:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scrIpts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Andika


Tim McNamara
Identi.ca / Twitter: @timClicks
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/attachments/20100131/dac52acb/attachment.htm